While modern personal computers and the Internet at large have reduced the amount of paper in most of our lives, they haven’t ushered in the “paperless society” that many predicted they would. At the end of the day, if you want a paperless office, sometimes you still need to take matters into your own hands. Enter the Epson WorkForce DS-520 Color Document Scanner ($400), a high-powered sheet-fed scanner designed to help you get control of at least some of the clutter in your life.
Designed for either personal desktop scanning or even to scale up to a workgroup, you can drop up to 50 sheets into the automatic document feeder and the DS-520 will zip through them at up to 30 pages-per-minute, scanning both sides. In addition to traditional paper documents, the DS-520 can also scan folder pages, rigid ID cards, and stacks of business cards. The scanner provides dynamic skew protection to keep your scans straight and double-feed detection technology for preventing jams. Epson has its own Epson Document Capture Pro app, but you can also scan to cloud services like Evernote and take advantage of advanced color and image adjustment capabilities and ISIS/TWAIN drivers for use with your favorite apps. If you’d prefer to keep your documents out of the cloud, the included OCR software lets you create searchable PDFs that you can save right on your Mac.